Alan Watts, beatnik-style enlightenment and liberation today

On FaceBook a video by Alan Watts ("What If Money Was No Object?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=siu6JYqOZ0g ) was recommended. This was the second time I'd seen this happen in a few weeks, so I wrote something caustic about it. This prompted a defence or two, and the following sensible question:

So what do the politicoes have to offer, Choppa? True, it is an illusion fostered by people who have found exactly what they want to do in life that 'you can do anything if you really want to' - an illusion which provides a very convenient explanation for any kind of social deprivation. But the central message of the importance of disregarding society's expectations if we are to get off this pathway to hell on earth - that still rings as true now as when I first heard Watts and others say it. I'm still very glad I got off the treadmill.

Since this illustrated the liberating effect of positions like Watts's back in the 60s, as far as rejecting the demands of established oppressive imperialist bourgeois values and imperatives is concerned, I made the following comment:

The freer you are, the better the choices you make. Feeling trapped is a good start - without it you won't want to be free or care about freedom. Back after ww2 a lot of us kids in the imperialist West felt very trapped and looked for ways out. This became the youth revolution. It started off quite some distance from the search for freedom the working class had been engaged in since the early nineteenth century. In the fifties and early sixties the individual aspects were paramount and the main thing was shaking off the leaden blanket of repression and hypocrisy in relation to social hierarchy and sex - a lot of it was cultural, music, books, poetry. The military religious oppression was combated with pacifism and non-Christian beliefs. Black priests were reviled, unquestioned authority was rejected. The easy solutions were the first big ones -  playful celebrations of individual self-expression. Peace and Love, flower power. Buddhism and the East.

In 1968 the two great lines - negative (reactive) youth revolt and positive (demanding a clear alternative) class revolt converged in the explosions of the Tet offensive in Vietnam and the May rebellions in Europe. Tet bloodied the nose of the US imperialist government, and May 68 severely shook European governments, both imperialist and stalinist.

The explosion was too formless to lead to much constructive change - imperialists and stalinists alike regrouped and a period of immense reactionary pressure began. The 1970s were full of conflicts during the regrouping and working out of the forces unleashed - the US was ejected from Vietnam, the Iranian revolution spat out the imperialist lickspittle Shah, Nicaragua arose against the US, but at the same time ABBA glam and disco sidelined rocknroll, the petty-bourgeois individualist rebels found their own little utopias or succumbed, and after a bumpy ride (winters of discontent, Nixon's impeachment) Thatcher and Reagan came to power and initiated the era of neo-liberal brutality whose fanfare was the Pinoshit coup against Allende's braindead utopian reformism in Chile in 1973.

Since then both the workers movement and the cultural rebellion have been burgeoning but formless - too powerful and too free to stuff back in the bottle, but too dispersed and disorganized (as well as too caged and reined in by false leadership) to create a strong explicit social alternative able to inspire the world.

We're still in a situation of stalemate in a lot of ways. In Lenin's words: "for a revolution to take place it is not enough for the exploited and oppressed masses to realise the impossibility of living in the old way, and demand changes; for a revolution to take place it is essential that the exploiters should not be able to live and rule in the old way. It is only when the "lower classes" do not want to live in the old way and the "upper classes" cannot carry on in the old way that the revolution can triumph." The unstable equilibrium between the unwillingness of the oppressed to continue being oppressed, and the capacity of the oppressors to continue oppressing them, is becoming more and more unstable. There is less and less equilibrium.

There is no symmetry between the efforts of the oppressors and the efforts of the oppressed, though. The "upper classes" are organized and very focused in their repression. Wikileaks reveals the truth about their activities and they deploy thousands of functionaries and millions of dollars to smash Wikileaks as an organization and break its operations, with total disregard for laws and rights enshrined in their own constitutions and legislation. For instance. The "lower classes" are disorganized, split into a thousand different tendencies and focused on a thousand different issues in a thousand different ways.

However, the incapacity of the oppressors is more and more obvious, and the focus of the oppressed is slowly improving, as we have recently seen in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. The rage at being trapped is overcoming the fear of the whip. Sufficient organization is present to create an alternative that can run things when the immediate target of the rebellion is brought down. The incoherence of the process makes it a bit like peeling an onion - one layer of oppression is removed to reveal a new, softer one beneath it.

Some constants can be seen between the rebellion of the postwar period and now - the longing for peace, freedom of expression and freedom from sexual and emotional slavery, but more and more politically and economically oriented, and less and less "timeless", ivory tower, and individually isolated. As long as the ruling classes are organized politically and economically the masses of young and working people longing for freedom will get nowhere without stronger organization based on their own economic and social interests. And people like Alan Watts offer nothing in this respect. And that benefits the ruling class, not us.

"No one's ever shown us a long-term working alternative to capitalism"

On a discussion group GA just wrote:

"nobody has hitherto managed to show in practice an alternative to a society harnessing the forces of capitalism that works, works in the long run, and works without serious side effects like dictatorship or other disproportionate limitations in the freedom of people to lead their lives"

I replied:

Well, it's not surprising, really, cos the history of human society doesn't work this way. The place of experiment has to be taken by real life commitment, on a huge scale. Comparing results needs an appropriately huge perspective both as regards time and place. 

We have seen perfectly clearly however that capitalism - as a long-term mode of production - does not work smoothly or beneficially for the mass of humanity. It proceeds from crisis to crisis, and the trade-offs in terms of health and well-being versus riches and technical advances are not worth making - from the point of view of the massive majority of people who merely produce the wealth rather than get to own and enjoy it. If today, after all these centuries, capitalism can do no better for the less well-placed than it's doing in Greece and Spain, let alone Haiti or Honduras, or South Africa or Rwanda, then it's an obvious failure. It is also totally incapable of systematically making use of the benefits of planned cooperation to apply available knowledge and techniques for the betterment of the majority of humanity. It can't even do this in the US (South Bronx, East LA), or the EU, let alone West Sahara or Eritrea. 

We have seen that certain important aspects of social progress - infrastructure, literacy, education, general (if basic) provision of health and education are much better managed in non-capitalist states, like the USSR, Yugoslavia, or China. This is quite amazing, historically speaking, given that the advantages became apparent so very rapidly. And given that the disadvantages inherent in the genesis and life of these states (non-hegemonic economic status, undemocratic governance removing the vast mass of the working people from planning and decision-making) are so very destructive and make them so vulnerable to aggressively hostile policies from more powerful capitalist rivals.

The road to social and  economic change and improvement will be created not by a small group of technocrats in an editorial office or library but by ordinary people getting together to run their own affairs free of exploitation and slave-driving, using free open cooperation with anyone they want using any ideas and techniques they want regardless of profits or patents. To do this, people will need ideas regarding political and economic and social organization, and they will have to fight to get their hands on these, since one of the major preoccupations of capitalism today is the stifling and extermination of these ideas and the organizations bearing them.

So, if you want a pre-validated successful non-capitalist society, you can forget it. Which means you either sigh, sit back and drink a resigned toast to really existing capitalism - Here's to Bhopal, Marikana, the Vietnam War, Iraq and Afghanistan! - or you get stuck in to making better alternatives than the ones that have half-worked in really existing (but far from optimal) non-capitalist societies. Or get swirled about in the wind with the sands on the bank of the Styx - a fate Dante wished upon the congenitally indecisive trimmers who never made a choice and never took sides. These poor sods never even got let into Hell - Charon felt too much contempt for them. Blowing through cold, dark, empty streets for all eternity.